With its new Vybe Super Stock ($1,798 direct), Maingear reminds purchasers of gaming desktops that it’s as good at going little as it is at going big. This cousin to Maingear’s bulky but powerful flagship Shift and its upper-midrange F131 packs lots of performance and useful features into a package that’s more subdued than scintillating. You don’t get every amenity possible at this price, which diminishes this system’s gleam a bit. But the Vybe Super Stock will nonetheless provide a significant jolt to your gaming without shocking your bank account too badly.

Design and Features Unlike its other Maingear brethren, the Vybe Super Stock makes few plays toward ostentation. The 17.5-by-19.25-by-8-inch (HWD) system is almost entirely black except for two red mesh “racing” stripes that run down both the left and right of the top and front panels, and a chrome Maingear logo that’s plastered dead center on the front. The side and rear panels are bare metal (though a tinted window, complete with air vent, graces one of the side panels), but the top and front panels are coated with a nice-feeling and fingerprint-repelling “Soft Touch” material that gives the case a mature look.

All that’s visible from the outside are the front-panel ports, which are located at the forward edge of the top panel. But it’s a fairly anemic selection: four USB 2.0 ports and headphone and mic jacks are all that accompany the power and reset button. If you’re looking for more contemporary options, such as eSATA or USB 3.0, you won’t find them here. The optical drive is hidden behind a door in the topmost of three external 5.25-inch bays, but even it’s a standard DVD±RW drive with LightScribe support for on-disc labeling—you can forget about playing or burning high-capacity Blu-ray discs on this system, another negative if you’re paying this much.

Open the side panel and you’ll see that you don’t have many other limitations; this PC’s component stock is pretty impressive. At its heart is an Intel Core i7-2600K processor, the most powerful in Intel’s second-generation Core (aka “Sandy Bridge”) line. But as this Vybe is a Super Stock, Maingear hasn’t left the CPU at its default 3.4GHz clock speed; the company has overclocked it to a sizzling 4.8GHz, which has the expected positive impact, as we’ll soon see. Because of the heat resulting from that overclocking Maingear has replaced Intel’s standard fan and heat sink unit with a closed-loop liquid cooling system, with the CPU water block emblazoned with a red version of Maingear’s logo and the radiator mounted on the rear panel. Additional cooling is provided by more traditional fans, with two 120mm intake fans in the front and another on top for exhaust. In terms of memory, there’s 8GB of G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 RAM; you can add two more DIMMs for a total of 16GB, though the motherboard supports up to 32GB.

Two 1GB EVGA video cards based on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti chipset, running in Scalable Link Interface (SLI) mode, handle graphics. Powering them and the rest of the system is a 660-watt Seasonic power supply; that’s sufficient juice for this configuration, but if you plan on upgrading the video cards, you may want to look into something more robust. If you want to upgrade anything else, you’ll have a fair amount of room for doing so: There are two free 5.25-inch external drive bays, seven free 3.5-inch internal bays, two free RAM bays, and three available expansion slots (two PCI Express x1 and one regular PCI).

On the rear panel you’ll find a wealth of connectivity options. There are the expected four DVI ports and two mini HDMI ports on the video cards’ brackets. On the motherboard there’s a dual PS/2 port for plugging in either a keyboard or mouse, an S/PDIF out port for digital audio, a single FireWire jack, Ethernet, and six ports for hooking up a full 7.1 surround-sound speaker system; topping it all off are eight USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports for high-speed data transfers.

In fact, the sole element on the Vybe Super Stock that verges on being skimpy and slow is its storage. You get one 1TB Samsung hard drive spinning at only 7,200rpm, and running over 3Gbps SATA II; for an $1,800 computer, we’d expect to see a solid-state drive (SSD) or a 10,000rpm hard drive for storing Windows and games running alongside this one, or even a 6Gbps single drive. Given the Vybe Super Stock’s otherwise acute attention to detail and efficiency, this is a notable oversight.

In fairness, the Vybe Super Stock does offer some compensation for this. Its motherboard is the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3-iSSD, which comes preinstalled with an SSD. This isn’t a typical drive, however. It’s an mSATA-form-factor variation on the 20GB Intel SSD 311 Series, which is based on SLC flash memory and intended for use with the Intel Smart Response Technology (SRT) feature introduced in Intel’s Z68 Express chipset. With SRT, you can either mirror data for a gentle speed increase and improved security (like RAID Level 1) or cache frequently used data to make key programs run faster but at an increased risk if a problem develops (similar to RAID Level 0). In our testing, SRT worked as advertised, so we highly recommend enabling it to maximize your computing experience&mdash;but don't expect it to give you full SSD-level speeds.

As with most systems from boutique vendors, the Vybe Super Stock is essentially free of bloatware; aside from the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system, the only extra software you’ll find is Microsoft Office 2010 Starter. Service includes a one-year warranty complete with labor and phone support, a 30-day “No Fail” guarantee under which Maingear will send you a new system if yours arrives with any mission-critical problems, and a program that lets you trade in the system within the first 18 months and receive a portion of its original value to put toward a replacement Maingear PC.

Performance Overall, you won’t have to worry too much about the Vybe Super Stock being underpowered. It delivered the expected outstanding results in our benchmark tests, in productivity as well as gaming applications. It scored a healthy 5,642 in the Futuremark PCMark 7 full-system test, it took a mere 57 seconds to convert a video file in Handbrake and 2 minutes 20 seconds to apply a dozen filters and effects to an image in Adobe Photoshop CS5, and its 9.20 score in our CineBench R11.5 rendering test was a hefty one.

Of course what really matters with a system like this is gaming. The Vybe Super Stock’s frame rates of 113.4 frames per second (fps) and 54.1fps in Crysis, and 210.8fps and 90.7fps in Lost Planet 2, in both cases respectively at 1,280 by 720 with medium details and at 1,920 by 1,080 with higher-level details, show that both DirectX 10 (DX10) and DX11 titles pose it no serious challenge. Its scores in our 3DMark 11 DX11 benchmark, of 12,777 at the Entry preset and 2,912 at the Extreme preset, bear this out as well.

The Vybe Super Stock is not quite the fastest high-end gaming desktop we’ve seen recently. The Digital Storm ODE Level 3 ($2,399, 4.5 stars), which is equipped with a similar processor but two Nvidia GTX 570 video cards, surpassed it in every gaming test, with the biggest frame rate improvements occurring at the higher resolutions. It attained 71fps in Crysis and 121.7fps in Lost Planet 2, each time at the more difficult 1,920-by-1,080 setting; and its 3,688 score on 3DMark 11’s Extreme preset was truly eye-popping.

This means that if you are desperate for the beefiest gaming desktop there is, demand the highest details at the highest resolutions, and don’t mind paying more for the privileges, you’re better off with something like the Digital Storm ODE Level 3. But if you have a hard pricing limit of about $1,800, or if you think you can live with some eye candy dialed back, the Maingear Vybe Super Stock is a terrific choice. If it’s slightly held back by some of its hardware in this configuration, for everyday gaming—and practically any other task you can think of—you’ll find the vibes the Vybe generates to be very good indeed.

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Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his B.A. in Dramatic Writing at Western Washington University, where he also minored in Web design and German. He has been building computers for himself and others for more than 20 years, and he spent several years working in IT and helpdesk capacities before escaping into the far more exciting world...
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